China’s population contracted for the third year in a row in 2024 despite an uptick in births.

Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry by email with a request for comment.

Why It Matters

Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party government has been rolling out measure after measure in hopes of encouraging young Chinese to have more children. Births have overall been on the decline despite the end of the decades-long one-child policy in 2016, leaving policymakers anxious over the impact this will have on the world’s second-largest economy .

The sharp decline in population—unprecedented in the absence of war, disease or famine—is concerning for the Chinese Communist Party government, which measures the one-party state’s overall strength in comprehensive national power and comes amid an economic slowdown and an aging workforce.

What To Know

The year 2023 saw the seventh consecutive year of declining births, despite the relaxation of China’s one-child policy to allow two children in 2016 and three in 2021, with the fertility rate falling to birth expected per woman’s lifetime, far below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to sustain a population.

By the end of 2024, China stood at 1.408 billion people, not including Hong Kong and Macau, a drop of 1.39 million since 2023, China’s statistics bureau wrote Friday in its annual population update.

Meanwhile, the number of those aged 65 and older ticked upward to 220.23 million, or 15.6 percent of the population, as the country continues along its steady path to become a super-aged population like neighboring Japan and South Korea.

The silver lining is that the births have inched upward after two years of decline, a reversal the statistic bureau attributed to new pro-natal policies and the year of the dragon, considered an auspicious year of the Chinese zodiac to give birth.

The year 2024 saw births stood at 9.54 million, a birth rate increase of 6.77 births per 1,000 people compared to 6.39 per 1,000 people in 2023. However, this was tempered by a mortality rate of 7.76 per 1,000, resulting in the overall population dip.

Wang Pingping, director-general of China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ Department of Population and Employment Statistics:

“It should also be noted that women of childbearing age, especially women of childbearing age in the prime of childbearing, are still decreasing, which still has an impact on the population born in China’s next stage. With the improvement of people’s living standards and the further improvement of medical security, the life expectancy of the population has continued to increase, which has played a key role in reducing the number of deaths.”

Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who conducts demography research, wrote on X (formerly Twitter:

“Since marriages fell 16.6 percent year-over-year in the first three quarters of 2024, including a 25.3 percent drop in the third quarter, the full year’s is projected to fall 18.8 percent, meaning births will plummet in 2025 (only 7+ million).”

What’s Next?

National and local authorities continue to introduce polices aimed to support new families. Yet they face an uphill battle with the rising cost of living in urban centers and shifting attitudes among younger generations, for whom starting a family is not necessarily a priority anymore.

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